


You're Not a Fan of My Illusions

by scioscribe



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: Gen, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-20
Updated: 2013-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-20 19:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/891144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gob's magic is real.  It's just infrequent, fickle, and subject to conditions, not unlike his family's approval.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're Not a Fan of My Illusions

**Author's Note:**

> Many heartfelt thanks to biohazardgirl for beta-reading this! (And for getting me hooked on the show to begin with.) Also, it's Arrested Development fic, so call-backs and shout-outs abound.

Everyone called him Georgie until Michael, in kindergarten, discovered initials.

Georgie had been instructed to walk his younger brother home from school every day while they were trailed by a private limousine that only Lindsay was allowed to ride in. The limousine came equipped with a camera and an amateur videographer, as George Sr. was already planning the first trilogy of the boyfights franchise. Unfortunately for their father, prolonged time alone together seemed to make the brothers get along better instead of worse; this was quickly discovered and corrected, to the point where Georgie—soon to be forever known as Gob—only walked Michael home from school for a week and a half.

He was supposed to hold Michael’s hand.

“Now,” George Sr. had said, “don’t let that make you feel like a little girl.”

As intended, this almost guaranteed that Georgie only held his brother’s hand when Michael would grab it on cross-walks marked by especially heavy traffic.

It was in the middle of one of these streets, secured snugly to his older brother’s left hand, that Michael said, “Your name is G O B.”

“Those are initials, Michael,” he said. They passed back onto the sidewalk again, but Georgie, as he so often did, forgot that he was supposed to hate holding Michael’s hand, and so kept on getting finger-paint splotches smeared on him.

“G O B,” Michael said, and because his school taught phonetics, he sounded it out with the pride of a boy whose picture books still had bite-marks at their corners. “Gob.”

Gob felt his proper name settle around his shoulders like a mantle.

No child of Lucille Bluth’s could fail to recognize the importance of a name in guaranteeing quality, so at that moment Gob felt like Michael had puckered out some part of his innermost stitching and read what was written on his tag.

“You’re up in the air,” Michael said.

“Huh.” Gob looked down. His feet were, in fact, two or three inches off the ground, which meant he was tugging Michael’s hand up above his head. This had never happened before. He drifted down.

Michael looked satisfied. “I always thought you could fly.”

The limousine driver and amateur videographer saw nothing, having neglected to observe traffic as carefully as Michael and so gotten into a fender-bender a block back. Lindsay demanded ice cream in compensation for her pain and suffering, which Lucille refused to provide. Gob and Michael hid themselves unnoticed in the backyard while Gob took his brother flying.

Two school days later, they both rode the limo home from school and, egged on by a second videographer, their father, and a busty blonde woman neither of them could identify, Gob poured orange soda down Michael’s back and Michael head-butted him in the stomach. Lindsay, satisfied with the front seat and the driver’s glove compartment stash of Skittles, remained content.

The boyfights progressed and did especially well in Mexico. Gob forgot how to fly because Michael stopped asking him to.

*

Gob’s magic did not work around his parents.

Being a Bluth and therefore married to self-destructive patterns of behavior, he staged, over the course of his childhood, twenty-seven magic shows, in which he was supposed to perform some impossible feat that would ensure his family’s love. His only concession to the apparent impossibility of this, as time went on, was the addition of a series of badly memorized card tricks and the neighbors’ pet rabbit Spartacus for the last eleven attempts. He read mail order catalogs and sent away for larger and more elaborate magic kits, since there was a pleasing consistency to them, but he did not mistake the collapsible hats and long tails of colored handkerchiefs for real magic. They were just the illusion of it. And, in all fairness, they also frequently did not work around his parents, paying audiences, or even mirrors.

He was practicing card tricks when Lindsay came home from a shopping trip and flung herself dramatically onto the couch before peeking up at him to make sure he was looking. This meant that Michael wasn’t home, because she would have gone to him first.

Lindsay was thirteen. Her boyfriend, who had seemingly inexplicably mistaken her for someone older, was eighteen, which Gob knew because the boyfriend had a habit of licking his lips, looking at Gob, and saying, “Yeah, but I’m eighteen, you know,” having also and less accurately mistaken Gob for someone older. Gob did not understand this and wouldn’t for several years, including some time after the one-time eighteen year-old had guest-starred in multiple and passionately enacted episodes of the cable drama _Queer as Folk_ , which Gob maintained he had only ever seen by accident.

Lindsay’s boyfriend had broken up with her in front of a Chinese restaurant with the expectation that they would continue with their lunch plans, which she was funding.

“Oh, fuck him,” Gob said. “You—you didn’t, though?”

She pressed her face into the sofa again. “It was a two-for-one lunch special with free eggrolls, Gob!”

“You had sex for free eggrolls?”

She looked up. “What? No, you perv, I bought him lunch.”

Gob decided that that was somehow worse, but made the mistake of saying so, which made Lindsay half-suffocate herself again while sobbing uncontrollably.

Gob could now see that Lindsay needed someone to cheer her up, and as the only person in the house besides their mother, he could further see that that duty fell to him.

“Look,” he said, and without even thinking about it, he pulled a full bouquet of pink roses out of his right sleeve. Gob had never noticed this, but whenever he found something up his sleeve for Lindsay, it was always on his right side, just as Michael was always on his left. Those were the hands they had held on the rare occasions he had been—depending on interpretation—either ordered or allowed to escort them to the playground.

Lindsay, like Gob, did not believe in letting emotions persist in the face of bribery. She sat up, reapplied her mascara and eyeliner, and then said, “They’re gorgeous. How did you keep them from getting all smashed in your shirt?”

Lindsay had been traumatized by one of the early dove incidents and had not forgotten it.

“A magician never reveals his secrets,” Gob said.

*

It was through Lindsay—who had a new boyfriend by the following Tuesday—that Gob came to understand the limitations of his magic. It only worked when his family needed him.

They did not need him very much.

For Gob, who couldn’t imagine not needing the people he loved, this was a soul-crushing disappointment, not to be undercut by the fact that he almost immediately upon this epiphany considered attempting to get Michael hooked on crack cocaine so his need would be as grabby and apparent as Gob’s own. But when a failed trip to what he thought was a local crack den and was actually the basement of a local cult dealer went awry in a way that would take too long to explain, Gob relented on inducing a drug addiction in his loved ones.

He then gleaned thirty sleeping pills from Lucille’s prescription bottles over the course of several months, all the while hoping someone would notice, which they did not.

That plan, too, was abandoned when he decided the simpler solution was to spend more time with Buster.

Buster didn’t always need Gob, but he always needed someone, preferably someone older and willing to take care of him. Gob could channel that need and meet it. This actually worked especially well if he wasn’t in the same room with Buster, since too many punches to the chest had made Buster as likely to be unnerved by his direct presence as comforted by it.

On Buster’s account, Gob tended to turn into a puppy—specifically a black Labrador retriever with slightly too long legs and a tendency, when excited, to pee on the carpet. He didn’t mean to.

Buster named his intermittent puppy Howard, a name Gob contested by taking an intentional crap on Buster’s brand new shoes. Buster, as it turned out, did not understand the message.

But Gob liked having his ears scratched and his belly rubbed, he liked playing tug-of-war with Buster and a knotted rope toy, and he liked barreling into Buster and knocking him down (a privilege he was equally fond of in human form). Gob, as the oldest brother, was allowed to mercilessly exploit and tease Buster, either to toughen him up as part of a secret fraternal love or just to have the sheer delight in fucking with him, but when Buster was upset because of _other_ people—preferably non-Bluths—Gob would turn into Howard and lick his face. This was an admittedly weird thing to do and so he preferred to take a Forget-Me-Now (given to him by Lindsay’s one-time eighteen year-old boyfriend so they could “you know, just do whatever, and we wouldn’t even have to think about it!”) afterwards.

Howard was a success until Buster discovered the Forget-Me-Nows, mistook them for dog medication, and fed several of them to Gob in a messy scoop of peanut butter.

This made Gob pass out and so not escape outside to change back to himself, which left him passed out on the living room floor when Lucille returned. After some screaming about Buster associating with and possibly killing strange animals—the almost-dead dog, coupled with his bed-wetting, made Lucille briefly afraid her youngest son was a budding psychopath—she called Animal Control to pick him up. Fortunately, she had dialed the wrong number, choosing instead the Animal Control cult that advocated the world be controlled by house-pets (in whose leader’s basement Gob had coincidentally tried to buy crack cocaine for his _other_ brother), and Gob was afforded time to wake up and escape.

Having narrowly avoided being neutered and potentially put to sleep by his own mother, Gob became leery of transforming.

Meanwhile Buster was put through a series of preemptive and painful rabies shots and so developed a crippling phobia of dogs and anyone who wasn’t his mother. She became, unfailingly, the person he needed, and Gob’s magic stopped working around him, too.

*

When Maeby was still in her crib, Gob made the stars on her ceiling glow and rotate. Maeby chewed on her fist, giggled, and became Gob’s favorite person.

He was not invited to spend much time with George-Michael.

“I’m your older brother,” Gob said. “I practically _raised_ you, Michael, with my own hands, with my own flesh and blood.”

“No, pretty sure that’s not how that worked. And I don’t want a fireball going off next to my son’s head, if it’s all the same to you.”

Gob was in Venice when his brother’s wife died, and he knew after that he had lost his chance to tell Michael about the magic that wasn’t just illusions, because Michael would never forgive him if Tracey had needed him at the end.

He caught the first flight home that he could, which meant he showed up at the viewing wearing the same liquor-stained tuxedo from the last night of the International Magicians Alliance conference. Lindsay shoved him in a bathroom with a plate of salmon rolls and told him that if Michael saw him like that, “smelling like Scotch and Venetian pussy at his wife’s funeral,” he would beat the living crap out of him.

Gob doubted that Michael was capable of such a feat, but was temporarily distracted by larger issues.

He ate three salmon rolls and drank a flute of champagne and—as a last-ditch measure—two bottle-caps of Listerine mouthwash. He then took off his tuxedo, folded it neatly over the shower curtain rod, and waited. A faint shivering sensation ran up and down his body. On Gob’s limited dial of emotions, he would have labeled it _hungry_. He ate another salmon roll in compensation even though he understood dimly that he was not getting this exactly right.

It was the first time his magic had worked on Michael’s account in years.

Michael, whatever he thought, needed his big brother.

When the tingling stopped, Gob looked down at himself. He was wearing a black suit with a dark blue tie. His shirt had French cuffs, which Michael liked but which Gob had never worn before. He smelled like Michael’s aftershave and—stranger and less compatible with the butch look he was hoping for—Tracey’s perfume.

He reached into his left cuff and pulled out a long-stemmed red rose, which, later that day, Michael would place on his wife’s coffin when a mix-up in the funeral arrangements delivered brightly-dyed daisies from a local pharmacy instead. Except for that, there were noticeably fewer catastrophes than other Bluth family gatherings. Gob didn’t know if anything besides the rose was due to him but decided to take credit for all of it.

That evening, Gob sat in a loose circle with his Michael, Lindsay, and his just-toddling niece and nephew, passing around a bottle of wine and obeying his strict instructions to not give any to the children. His head was hazy. He pulled chocolate pirate coins out of George-Michael and Maeby’s ears. Maeby eyed each coin suspiciously before she chewed on it.

Lindsay had her head on Michael’s shoulder, but she was looking at Gob and his scattered pile of golden foil wrappers when she said, “You’re better at that when you’re drunk.”

Gob was drunk, which was why he told the truth. “No, I’m better because Michael’s wife is dead.”

Michael, unfortunately, had inherited his mother’s head for liquor and was still fairly sober.

*

It was on the night of Tracey Bluth’s funeral that Gob discovered his last, greatest, and most frequently demanded talent: he could make himself disappear.

At that moment, sprawled across the gleaming green lawn of their family home, what his family had needed most from him was to not be there, so, in a flash, he wasn’t.

Michael, he later learned, had assumed Gob had demonstrated rare good sense by walking away. Lindsay had been busy trying to comfort Michael by pouring more wine down his throat and Buster had still been drooling onto a lawn-chair, having passed out a full hour before Gob’s ill-advised explanation of magic. The children saw him vanish and spent months afterwards announcing to their parents that Uncle Gob was a magician, which of course their parents mistakenly thought they already knew.

As the years went on, the one piece of magic Gob could consistently count on being able to perform was his disappearing act. He couldn’t pull hundred dollar bills out of his pockets because no one _needed_ him to, since the possibility of needing him had never crossed their minds. The best he could do, from time to time, was not be there, and so he wasn’t.

The one person this did _not_ work on was Steve Holt, but Gob was too afraid of thinking of Steve Holt as family to ponder the implications of that.

Most of the time, he was just gone. It saved a lot on living expenses.

“Where do you go all the time, anyway?” Michael said. He patted Gob on the shoulder. “I won’t say we miss you around the house sometimes, but—”

“You don’t,” Gob said, but it seemed like Michael at least needed for him to be happy and uncomplicated, and he supposed that meant Michael loved him, so he did a successful fireball, sans lighter fluid, to demonstrate his cheerfulness, and tried to make himself smile.


End file.
